[Lnc-business] Email Ballot 2017-06: Move Archive Records to CO

William Redpath wredpath2 at yahoo.com
Sun Apr 2 08:18:44 EDT 2017


Yes.  Bill Redpath
--------------------------------------------
On Sat, 4/1/17, Arvin Vohra <votevohra at gmail.com> wrote:

 Subject: Re: [Lnc-business] Email Ballot 2017-06: Move Archive Records to CO
 To: lnc-business at hq.lp.org
 Date: Saturday, April 1, 2017, 6:50 PM
 
 Yes
 On Mar 29, 2017 8:34
 PM, "Brett Bittner" <brett.bittner at lp.org>
 wrote:
 I vote Aye on email ballot
 2017-06.
 Brett 
 
 **This message sent from my phone. Please excuse any
 typos.
 On Mar 29, 2017 20:31,
 "Caryn Ann Harlos" <carynannharlos at gmail.com>
 wrote:
 To supplement the other update and
 relevant to this motion: I now have two volunteers willing
 to dedicate an entire week block of time if the records are
 in the Denver area to work on the project.  This is with
 minimal word of mouth from person(s) who read the LNC
 list.  I believe I would get several regular crews.  LPCO
 already has a commitment to its history (unfortunately some
 records list due to past neglect prior to my time and were
 soiled by vermin).  I am a prolific volunteer recruiter
 when I need them.
 -Caryn Ann 
 
 
 On Tue, Mar 28,
 2017 at 3:19 PM Caryn Ann Harlos <carynannharlos at gmail.com>
 wrote:
 Hi
 Joshua, any historical work with a budget is going to
 require prioritization which requires knowing what we
 have.  If it were just the records in the basement, that
 would not be an issue (another volunteer I found just spent
 two more days there - total volunteer time on the project
 now totals likely over a 100 hours between inventory work
 and LPedia database fix issues - IOW significant volunteer
 has already been expended - we have been effective).  It is
 the storage facility records that are the issue.  If they
 remain there, one possible avenue to keep staff uninvolved
 as much as possible is to grant me the key to designate to a
 certain core group of volunteers in the area to be
 determined.  I am confident that whatever is decided, we
 will make the most effective, cheapest, least intrusive
 means possible.  As I said, I will have to spend vacation
 time in VA this summer if they are not moved.  I do not
 require any staff oversight, but that money could go to the
 Party rather than Southwest and Marriot.
 And
 no, this year that expense will not grow (and next year is a
 different budget discussion).  I am convinced it is too
 high by at least $1000 (unless salary is way more than I
 figure in my head - which of course would be a confidential
 discussion).  And I want to remind everyone that I already
 raised nearly $1200 and promised an additional $1500 if the
 move was approved.  So if I am right (and I am pretty
 convinced I am) that the $9000 figure is correct, taking
 away the pledge and the amount raised, we are at $6800. 
 Which is only $1800 more than the LNC expected already to
 come out of the budget (and most certainly money will be
 raised toward that) in additional to the free professional
 labor.  Putting aside that this is my project and I have a
 bias, we need to be supporting these volunteer initiative
 small projects.  I could wax long about that, but I will
 save it to not bore everyone to death with this post.  But
 you are right, we have spent more discussing a relatively
 trivial amount with a potential result of volunteered time,
 product, and good will way beyond the amount.  For once, I
 am nearly talked out - miracle of miracle.  I have never
 tried so hard to give away so many hours of my professional
 time over several years.
 I
 don't think there is much btw that falls in some third
 category. I do think that is somewhat of a false premise. 
 I broadly went through records in the facility and it was
 not that category (membership slips should be scanned IMHO -
 whether they are published is a different decision).  There
 are filing cabinets in the basement which do, but which have
 always been outside our scope.
 I
 find it interesting that it seems there is a critique that
 the original scanning budget has not been spent - it seems
 my prudence and caution is being used as a point of
 suspicion rather than good stewardship which rather reminds
 me of government budgeting.  I could have spent it in a
 week.  I am determined to squeeze it for every penny but it
 seems that this suggestion would have had a lot less
 discussion if I were irresponsible.  I did get some advice
 to just spent it right away being cautioned about this very
 thing.  I don't operate that way.  I treat OPM (other
 people's money) as sacred.  I have spent my own money
 on misc items rather than nickel or diming this. 
 Volunteers have spent days from their vacation time -
 neither of them lived by HQ, one was further away in VA and
 the other was all the way from AZ.  
 PS:
  I have a volunteer willing to commit a full week of time
 to assisting with these records,, if they are moved to
 CO.
 -Caryn
 Ann
 
 On
 Tue, Mar 28, 2017 at 12:48 PM, Joshua Katz <planning4liberty at gmail.com>
 wrote:
 Well,
 let me say this:  the debate on this motion has entirely
 changed my view on the questions involved.  One thing I am
 gleaning from the debate, though, is that different people
 are talking about entirely different issues and concerns,
 and several of those issues are not well-framed enough to be
 answered in a yes/no manner.  For a while, I thought the
 debate was largely off-track because it was getting into the
 weeds, but now I realize that some of those weeds are LNC
 concerns, and others, despite ideally not being LNC
 concerns, have become such due to a lack of other governance
 mechanisms.  I will attempt here to lay out what I see as
 the issues being discussed - largely independently - and
 suggest that the question be narrowed.
 The
 Stuff
 We
 have piles of stuff, is what I'm gathering.  We passed
 a motion a while ago, creating the Historical Committee,
 which I think was implicitly premised on the idea that the
 stuff falls into two groups:  garbage, and things we wish
 to preserve for historical value.  At least, that was my
 implicit premise.  Now we're finding, though, that
 there's a third group: things we wish to preserve for
 legal/business purposes.  This suggests to me that our
 handling of the previous motion might not have been
 sufficient because of this faulty premise.  So we're
 left with a broad question:  how to handle all this
 stuff.  I think a lot of us thought our previous motion
 would take care of that, but perhaps it will not if this
 third category exists.
 Financial
 Considerations
 This
 is what I originally thought this motion was all about -
 spending money.  In particular, it seems to me that this
 motion is based on the idea that the money we previously
 allocated was not sufficient.  This gives me independent
 concerns:  if the expected cost of a project doubles in a
 matter of weeks, experience shows us that it is likely to
 continue rising.  I also would like to know how we learned
 this - since none of the originally allocated money has been
 spent, and the proposed increase is exactly the amount
 allocated, why can't the allocated money be spent to do
 this?  While much discussion has been about the proposed
 object, the motion seems to me only to authorize money, and
 to take for granted that the moving can be done by staff as
 long as the money is there.  
 Now,
 assuming there's some other use for the original $5k, I
 don't think what Wes has told us suggests that we can do
 this project for either $5k or $10k.  I think it suggests
 that the cost of the project is (at least) $10k, once staff
 time is included, as it should be.  A functionally
 allocated budget would have made this clear, whereas with
 our current budgeting procedures it has to come out in
 discussion and remain a little fuzzy, but that's how
 I'm reading it.  We can spend the additional $5k in
 cash, or we can spend it in lost staff time.  That brings
 up a new question, then - since we approved the project at
 $5k, do we still think it is worth doing at $10k?  I think
 that's perfectly well-framed to be answered with a
 yes/no decision.  However, what is less clear is what
 happens if we say no.  One option is that things would
 remain at status quo, and we'd continue paying for
 storage space.  Another is to throw everything out.  There
 are probably other options, too.
 The
 Value of Things in Storage
 Focusing
 for a moment on the items of business/legal significance, I
 think that, if a clean-up project does not proceed, they
 might as well be in the trash.  It is extremely unlikely
 that things can be found when needed, and it would be
 healthier, when such a concern comes up, to be able to say
 cheerfully "yep, it's gone," than to have a
 vague notion that it may exist in a large pile of stuff,
 buried under furniture. 
 Turning
 to the historical items, I confess to being less interested
 in these than others are, but I take the result of the vote
 to suggest that we find it important, and so we're
 unlikely to think they're worth preserving at $5k, but
 worth throwing out if it would cost $10k.  In the grand
 scheme of things, $5k is not much money, and it's
 believed that there are donations available to support much
 of this.  In my mind, though, such donations are currently
 speculative - and I can speculate that costs will continue
 rising.  So let's ignore both speculations and assume
 we'll be spending the money out of what's currently
 in our budget - it's still rather small and not worth
 much of the time spent discussing it.  Heck, it's the
 amount we let the chair spend freely - which raises one
 possible solution.  More generally, it raises the idea that
 we should be freer with allocating budgets to projects
 without involving ourselves in the questions of how the
 money is spent.  Personally, I find it baffling that we
 turn over the vast majority of our budget to staff, yet
 insist on weird control mechanisms for small portions -
 putting the most control on money to be spent by committees,
 largely populated by board members.  I have no idea why we
 single out budget access, for instance, for EC control (why
 not, at least, control by the people directing ballot
 access?), but leave half the budget in Compensation.  But
 then, I don't understand many things about the
 world.
 Budgetary
 Impact
 That
 said, and I don't want to spend a lot of time on this,
 when donations are available for a given project, it is not
 always clear if they will increase total revenue, or simply
 be taken out of other giving the same people might otherwise
 have planned.  I suspect the answer is somewhere in the
 middle - a $10k project, fully funded by donations, will not
 cost us $10k, but also will not cost us $0, all things
 considered.
 Why
 is There a Pile of Stuff?
 I
 think Wes has well explained this one - people are afraid to
 throw things out.  A few years ago, I was elected Secretary
 of my fire department.  I went through old minutes and
 found that all correspondence was there - i.e. Christmas
 cards, invitations to Climb for Life, for decades.  This
 doesn't make it particularly easy to do the project I
 was engaged in - no one had kept records of standing rules,
 so I was attempting to reconstruct them from old minutes.
  (A fun story for anyone who says "I don't see
 what's wrong with including discussion in the
 minutes" or who fails to see why it is important to
 record the actual language of the motion.)  Anyway, with a
 custom going back decades, it's hard to be the one who
 decides to break it.  The solution is a document retention
 policy, which we should come up with.  I will move in
 Pittsburgh that we appoint a committee to recommend
 one.
 How
 to Throw Things Out
 Although
 we have agreed that the LNC will make this decision, based
 on this discussion, I am questioning the wisdom of that
 move.  I think if a committee is going through this
 material, and if we have adopted such a policy, that
 committee should be free to throw things out within that
 policy.  Currently, as the Secretary notes, making these
 calls would take a good amount of expertise with the
 specifics of the materials.  With a document retention plan
 in place, I don't think it will.  I think it would be
 crazy for the LNC to make document by document decisions,
 personally.  Let's set some rules about what sorts of
 things we want to keep, and then let volunteers have at
 it.
 Purpose
 of Historical Committee
 As
 the Secretary notes, we appointed a historical committee,
 not a clean-up committee.  If it turns out that cleaning up
 is necessary before the historical work can be done, we need
 to decide if the historical committee is the right committee
 for that purpose, or if something else needs to be done
 first.  
 Joshua
 A. Katz
 
 
 
 On
 Mon, Mar 27, 2017 at 10:36 PM, Caryn Ann Harlos <carynannharlos at gmail.com>
 wrote:
 Hi
 Alicia,
 My
 recommendations will be primarily about duplicates.  I do
 believe I am experienced enough to determine a duplicate. 
 I also undertook a similar (obviously smaller scale but in
 principle the same) project already in Colorado (http://www.lpcolorado.org/arc
 hives).
 The
 rest would be done via inventory and in consultation with
 more experienced Party members.
 I
 do not have experience in years, but I have experience in
 diving in more deeply than persons with twenty years of
 experience have done.  Further CO has a wide breath of
 available persons to volunteer.
 Right
  now there is no danger of anyone's experience because
 it simply isn't being done, and unless another person
 with the passion I have for the topic appears, it likely
 will not in any forseeable future.  It hasn't so
 far.
 I
 respectfully submit that making recommendations is not
 complicated and I believe I have proven my understanding on
 historical artifacts.  
 -Caryn
 Ann
 On
 Mon, Mar 27, 2017 at 9:26 PM, Alicia Mattson <agmattson at gmail.com>
 wrote:
 Starchild,
 
 My
 concerns are not about the city in which the analysis is
 done, but about the depth of experience of the person
 analyzing the contents in order to characterize them for the
 decision maker(s).
 
 -Alicia
 
 
 On
 Sun, Mar 26, 2017 at 4:34 PM, Starchild <sfdreamer at earthlink.net>
 wrote:
 
 Alicia,
 	If there were an
 amendment or second motion that none of the materials to be
 sent to Colorado be discarded without an elected or
 appointed member of the party leadership gives the okay,
 would that  allay your concerns? Or perhaps a
 motion/amendment saying certain categories of things
 can't be discarded, period? Having seen the kind of
 stuff that's sometimes been left behind and thrown away
 after LP conventions – current outreach materials, unused
 office supplies, etc. – not to mention stuff being deleted
 from our website, old meeting minutes and other important
 records apparently having been thrown out by people at
 various times, etc., I share your concern that things might
 get thrown out which would better be saved. 
 	Where we may possibly
 see things differently is that I don't perceive there
 being a greater risk of this occurring in Colorado than in
 Alexandria. The discarding of minutes and other important
 past materials presumably took place in the D.C. area. More
 recently, Wes mentioned in a recent message that he
 discarded some stuff, and although I trust there were no
 minutes among those materials, there wasn't a lot of
 detail provided about precisely what they did
 include, and I can't help wondering whether anything was
 discarded that I personally might have kept. I might have
 the same concern upon hearing of stuff discarded in
 Colorado, of course, but I wouldn't be any more
 concerned.
 Love
 & Liberty, 
                               ((( starchild
 )))At-Large
 Representative, Libertarian National Committee 
                             (415)
 625-FREE 
                              
 @StarchildSF
 
 
 On
 Mar 26, 2017, at 2:16 PM, Alicia Mattson wrote:
 The
 discussion on this thread paints the motion in a very
 different light for me.  I want to take a step back and put
 this in context.
 
 The
 motion adopted by email ballot to create this committee
 included the following scope description:
 
 "The
 LNC establishes a Historic Preservation Committee to help
 preserve and publish historical documents of the party and
 to manage LPedia."
 
 The
 goal is to preserve and publish things of historical
 value.
 
 This
 motion suggests that the newly-requested funds will be
 used:
 
 "to
 budget an additional $5,000 (budget line 90) to relocate the
 
 
 historical records in the Duke Street basement and in the
 off-site 
 
 storage facility to a location in Colorado..."
 
 That
 to me sounds like the materials in question are of
 historical value, and it thus warrants the expenditure to
 preserve them.
 
 What
 we're learning, though, is that possibly the vast
 majority of this material is trash, and we're paying
 thousands of dollars to ship trash to Colorado to be thrown
 away there.
 
 This
 is really more of a document destruction project than a
 historical preservation project, though along the way it
 will likely find a few historical documents worth
 preserving.
 
 We
 created a Historic Perservation Committee, rather than a
 Basement Cleanout Committee, and they're very different
 tasks.
 
 I
 would be comfortable with volunteers in Colorado taking
 things deemed to have historic value and scanning them for
 preservation, or making them available for silent auction
 fundraising, etc.
 
 I
 am not comfortable with volunteers in Colorado who have no
 experience in operations of our headquarters essentially
 making decisions about what documents get thrown away.
 
 The
 reason I spent a day in the Watergate dungeon (I think it
 was in the fall of 2011) digging through that material is
 because I was looking for some records that should have been
 preserved in perpetuity, but someone
 who didn't understand their importance apparently threw
 them out. They actually had very high value for legal
 reasons.
 
 As
 pretty as it sounds to have a team of volunteers in the
 birthplace of the LP building historical archives, a
 person's Colorado residence doesn't grant them
 magical knowledge of what business records ought to be kept
 and which ones ought to be thrown away.
 
 I
 realize that you say that the LNC will ultimately decide
 which things get tossed, but the quality of the LNC's
 decision depends heavily on the description of the records
 we are given.  If a volunteer describes to us that a box
 contains miscellaneous receipts, it's one thing if
 it's 15-year-old receipts for office supplies that have
 long since been used up, but it's another if the
 receipts are for equipment still in use today and maybe
 still under warranty.  If a volunteer describes to us that
 a box contains old email correspondence with a state chair,
 it's one thing if the conversation was, "I look
 forward to seeing you at the convention", but it's
 another thing if the conversation was relaying facts about a
 situation that is the subject of a lawsuit.
 
 If
 the person looking at the records doesn't really
 understand the context of the records, how can they give us
 the key information we need to make an informed decision
 about which ones to throw away?
 
 This
 is not a project that should be undertaken by people with no
 understanding of our party operations.
 
 There
 may also be old employment records with sensitive personnel
 information, social security numbers, etc., and those
 shouldn't just be passed around among random
 volunteers.
 
 I
 have no objection to paying for the committee chair to make
 a trip to the storage facility, spend a few days sorting
 through it to find items of historical value, and then
 shipping those 10 boxes to Colorado for further
 processing.  That is within the function of a Historic
 Preservation Committee.
 
 I
 do have objection to shipping our
 trash-mixed-with-important-rec ords across the country for
 people who don't understand what is valuable and what
 isn't to give us vague descriptions which will be the
 basis of uninformed decisions for destroying our records. 
 This document destruction task is not what I had in mind
 when the Historic Preservation Committee was created.
 
 For
 several years our outside auditors have been urging us to
 adopt document retention policies (and also whistleblower
 policies, but that's another subject).  I think it was
 two terms ago near the end of that term that the Audit
 Committee proposed some starter language to try to get the
 ball rolling, but the LNC has not yet implemented
 anything.
 
 At
 minimum we need to establish how long certain records are to
 be kept such as employment records, financial records,
 membership certifications, and other categories.  These can
 be important to keep for legal reasons, for FEC compliance,
 etc.  Even after we make those policy decisions, I think
 the document maintenance has to be done by knowledgeable
 insiders rather than miscellaneous volunteers.
 
 -Alicia
 
 
 
 
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 --
 
 In
 Liberty,Caryn
 Ann HarlosRegion
 1 Representative, Libertarian National
 Committee (Alaska,
 Arizona, Colorado, Hawaii, Kansas, Montana, Utah, Wyoming,
 Washington) - Caryn.Ann.
 Harlos at LP.orgCommunications
 Director, Libertarian
 Party of ColoradoColorado
 State Coordinator, Libertarian
 Party Radical Caucus Chair,
 LP Historical Preservation Committee
 A
 haiku to the Statement of Principles:We
 defend your rightsAnd
 oppose the use of forceTaxation
 is theft
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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 _________________
 
 
 Lnc-business mailing list
 
 
 Lnc-business at hq.lp.org
 
 
 http://hq.lp.org/mailman/listi
 nfo/lnc-business_hq.lp.org
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 ______________________________
 _________________
 
 
 Lnc-business mailing list
 
 
 Lnc-business at hq.lp.org
 
 
 http://hq.lp.org/mailman/listi
 nfo/lnc-business_hq.lp.org
 
 
 
 
 
 
 --
 
 In
 Liberty,Caryn
 Ann HarlosRegion
 1 Representative, Libertarian National
 Committee (Alaska,
 Arizona, Colorado, Hawaii, Kansas, Montana, Utah, Wyoming,
 Washington) - Caryn.Ann.
 Harlos at LP.orgCommunications
 Director, Libertarian
 Party of ColoradoColorado
 State Coordinator, Libertarian
 Party Radical Caucus Chair,
 LP Historical Preservation Committee
 A
 haiku to the Statement of Principles:We
 defend your rightsAnd
 oppose the use of forceTaxation
 is theft
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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 Lnc-business at hq.lp.org
 
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